5. the Merry Wives of Windsor

5. The Merry Wives of Windsor Henry IV Part 1 was almost certainly performed before Queen Elizabeth in the winter of 1596-7. There is a long tradition that the Queen was so taken with Falstaff that she commanded Shakespeare to write a play showing ‘Sir John in love’, and that he interrupted the writing of Henry IV Part 2 to produce The Merry Wives in a fortnight. It was probably first performed before her at the Garter Feast on St, George’s Day (possibly also Shakespeare’s birthday) 23 April 1597, to her great satisfaction. This account feels right - the setting of the play at Windsor, the many topical references to court matters, the reference to the garter, the reference to the Queen herself: ‘our radiant Queen’, the assumption of an audience knowing Latin ... But does the play, in fact, show Falstaff in love? Dr. Johnson commented wisely: Shakespeare knew what the queen, if the story be true, seems not to have known, that by any real passion of tenderness, the selfish craft, the careless jollity, and the lazy luxury of Falstaff, must have suffered so much abatement, that little of his former cast would have remained. Falstaff could not love, but by ceasing to be Falstaff. He could only counterfeit love, and his professions could be prompted, not by hope of pleasure, but of money. Shakespeare cleverly evades the royal request while seeming to meet it, by having Sir John only pretend to be in love. The Merry Wives is unique in several ways. With the exception of The Tempest, it is the only Shakespeare play without a source; that is, the only play whose plot and characters are made up by himself, though of course it draws heavily on traditional farce. It is the only play to portray contemporary domestic life - ordinary middle-class life in the England of his time. In spite of the odd references to Prince Hal, the whole feeling of the play is that we are in Elizabeth's Windsor. It is full of colloquial middle-class country-town speech and mores. It has often been said that this Falstaff is a pale shadow of the Falstaff of the Henry 1V plays. He is in his element lording it at the Boar's Head in Eastcheap. At Windsor he is out of it: ‘What tempest threw this whale, with so many tuns of oil in his belly, ashore at Windsor?’ He is not used to the company of 'honest' people, least of all 'honest' women. He cannot tell turtles from jays. To be honest in Eastcheap is to be simple. But these women are quite capable of outwitting him. Of course there is more to the play than the humiliation of Falstaff. Falstaff is after money under cover of lechery. The ‘honest’ bourgeois folk of Windsor are just as unscrupulous and more hypocritical in their pursuit of it. Page is after money under cover of puritan thrift. His daughter laments : This is my father's choice. 0, what a world of vile ill-favour'd faults Looks handsome in three hundred pounds a year! * * * Pagan rites are again in evidence in The Merry Wives of Windsor, but much closer to home, not in the woods near the Athens of antiquity, but in Windsor Forest close to a community of solid bourgeois Elizabethan citizens. Falstaff is seen by the whole community as a threat to the order on which it depends, as the embodiment of riot, vice, in particular the deadly sin of lechery. In spite of the comic context, the words used of him - 'corrupted', 'tainted', 'unclean' - are very strong. He is the old Adam to be castigated and cast out. Almost, he is the devil himself. The pre-Christian horned god, known to the Romans as Cernunnos, 'lord of the animals', god of the chase, appears in British folklore as Herne the Hunter. This god was still worshipped by the witches of Shakespeare's time. But apart from the witches, knowledge of such cults had become for the average Elizabethan almost as shadowy as our own knowledge of the significance of such pagan rituals as still survive, our maypoles, bonfires, holly and ivy. Ford has an irrational hatred of witches, though he admits to knowing nothing of their practices. They are, he says, 'beyond our element'. That Falstaff should be disguised as the witch of Brainford is a parody of the shape-shifting powers of the witches and their god. The name of Herne the Hunter meant almost as little to the Pages and Fords of Shakespeare's day as it does to us: The superstitious idle-headed eld Receiv'd, and did deliver to our age, This tale of Herne the hunter for a truth. Yet his oak still seemed a fearful place to them, to be avoided after dark: Why, yet there want not many that do fear In deep of night to walk by this Herne's oak. When the tree finally fell, two hundred years later, it must have been something more than mere antiquity which caused its wood to be made into curios, some of which survive to this day. One of them belongs to Ted Hughes, the author of Gaudete, in which a man who is part oak and part fertility god, a lecherous seducer of the village wives, throws their husbands into a panic and is hunted down by them, killed and burned. Why should Shakespeare drag Herne the Hunter and all that hazy pagan folklore into so casual a comedy as The Merry Wives? Within the shallow materialistic world of Windsor, Falstaff comes to seem a representative, however degraded, of the fertility god himself. He sees himself as a scapegoat persecuted by Puritans: 'This is enough to be the decay of lust and late-walking through the realm'. He invokes, at the climax, 'omnipotent love', 'that in some respects makes a beast a man; in some other, a man a beast'. He has indeed become a beast - 'a Windsor stag, and the fattest, I think, i' th' forest' - but simultaneously a god shape- shifting for love: 'When gods have hot backs, what shall poor men do?' His frank sexuality ('My doe with the black scut') is much to be preferred to the puritanical violence Parson Evans schools the children in: Fie on sinful fantasy, Fie on lust and luxury! ... Pinch him, and burn him, and turn him about, Till candles and starlight and moonshine be out. Had Evans the power of Prospero and real hobgoblins at his disposal, Falstaff would no doubt have been as tormented as Caliban. The 'public sport' which the merry wives improvise to exorcise Sir John is clearly based on, made up of vestiges from, ancient rituals whose original meaning has been quite forgotten. Falstaff is told to come to Herne's oak at night 'disguised like Herne, with huge horns on his head'. Their children, dressed as fairies, will then 'pinch him sound, And burn him with their tapers'. The original fairies were probably an ancient race, worshippers of the horned god. Herne is, according to Graves, closely associated with Hermes, who was Hecate's messenger and lover. Fairies had not, for Shakespeare, quite lost their association with the triple Hecate, but for the merry wives they have already declined into the gossamer creatures of children's stories. The pinching may be a dim memory of the fate of the hunter- god - to be torn apart by his hounds. It may also remind us of the pinching of Caliban by sprites. Caliban's mother Sycorax is identified by Graves with triple Hecate. The real fairies might well have danced round the horned god, dressed in white and green, 'with rounds of waxen tapers on their heads' (as in surviving Scandinavian rituals). They may well have burned him - to death, but not as an act of moral cleansing; rather, on the contrary, as a guarantee of his rebirth the following year rejuvenated and revitalized in order to be able to resume his role as fertility god. This is the opposite of Mistress Page, who, intending to 'dis- horn the spirit', is proposing a symbolic castration. Falstaff's venery is also to be preferred to the cold materialistic calculation of those who triumph over him. Their 'virtue' and 'scruple' is devalued by the mutual deception of Page and his wife over the marriage of their daughter. Guarding her own honour so scrupulously, Mistress Page does not scruple to try to sell her daughter: You would have married her most shamefully, Where there was no proportion held in love. Ford admits that money buys lands, not wives. And Page concedes that 'What cannot be eschew'd must be embrac'd'. Falstaff, like the green girdle in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, is precisely that which cannot be eschewed from a full and balanced life. 'Banish plump Jack and banish all the world', he had said to Prince Hal. And here, this being a comedy, he is not banished. The union of Anne and Fenton under Herne's oak vindicates him. The distinction between love and lust dissolves in laughter. He is welcomed back into the human community: Master Fenton, Heaven give you many, many merry days! Good husband, let us every one go home And laugh this sport o'er by a country fire, Sir John and all. [© Keith Sagar 2002. This essay may be quoted with due acknowledgement.] Falstaff is seen by the whole community as a threat to the order upon which it depends, as the embodiment of riot, vice, in particular the deadly sin of lecher%t.

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